The Quantum Mirror Archives — Part I of V
An impossible collection of film reviews reveals a Star Wars saga that took a very different path through the 1980s.
A long time ago, in a history not quite our own...
Somewhere beyond the familiar boundaries of our universe, there may be another version of the twentieth century.
One in which familiar people made different decisions. One in which films were released in a different order, famous collaborations occurred that never happened here, and stories we thought we knew developed into something entirely unexpected.
Imagine that we possessed a means of looking into that history.
Not a time machine, exactly, but something more peculiar.
A Quantum Mirror.
An aperture into a parallel reality where events can be observed but not changed, and where the surviving cultural records of another world can occasionally be examined.
This is the premise of the Quantum Mirror Archives.
Our first discovery concerns six films that should be familiar to almost everyone.
Or perhaps only three of them.
The unexpected archive
The records initially appeared unremarkable: film reviews, production notes, newspaper clippings and studio correspondence dating from 1977 through 1986.
The first film was Star Wars, released in 1977.
Nothing unusual there.
But the subsequent chronology immediately raised questions.
The Empire Strikes Back appeared in 1979, followed by Return of the Jedi in 1981.
Then came three films we had never seen:
- Star Wars: Episode I — The Republic (1984)
- Star Wars: Episode II — The Clone Wars (1985)
- Star Wars: Episode III — The Dark Times (1986)
These were not the prequels released in our own universe between 1999 and 2005.
They were a completely different trilogy, conceived while the original films were still being made, scripted by writers shaped by the preceding decades, and produced before digital filmmaking transformed the visual language of science fiction.
More surprising still were the names associated with the production.
George Lucas remained responsible for creating the universe, but the new stories were entrusted to novelist Alan Dean Foster, with Steven Spielberg providing substantial creative direction.
The production notes also described an unusually literary approach to the mythology, drawing upon themes associated with J.R.R. Tolkien: the seduction of power, the fragility of civilizations and the moral dangers of attempting to defeat evil using its own methods.
Tolkien himself could not have participated in the project, having died in 1973. But in this history his literary legacy exerted a profound influence.
A different kind of prequel
The most remarkable discovery was not the altered production history.
It was the story.
In the familiar prequel trilogy, Anakin Skywalker is an extraordinarily gifted child whose fear, attachments and manipulation by a Sith Lord culminate in his transformation into Darth Vader.
In the films preserved by the Quantum Mirror, Anakin is something more unsettling.
He is a capable, intelligent and fundamentally decent young man who becomes convinced that civilization can be preserved only through increasingly authoritarian measures.
His transformation does not occur because he suddenly wishes to do evil.
It occurs because he becomes willing to do terrible things in the name of preventing something worse.
And the Galactic Republic does not collapse because one villain simply outwits everyone.
It collapses because its institutions, leaders and citizens gradually accept measures that appear necessary to protect their way of life.
The Republic becomes the Empire while insisting that nothing essential has changed.
The films' vanished world
There is something profoundly 1970s about these stories.
The influence of Vietnam, Watergate, Cold War anxiety and a growing skepticism toward political authority can be felt throughout the trilogy.
Yet the films apparently retained the essential optimism of the original Star Wars.
The Force remained mysterious. The Jedi were fallible. The galaxy looked ancient, mechanical and thoroughly inhabited.
Technology was not magical. Governments were not uniformly villainous. Good people could make disastrous decisions.
And redemption, when it finally came, was not a reward for having been secretly innocent.
It was the consequence of accepting responsibility.
Opening the archive
Over the next four installments, we will examine what the Quantum Mirror preserved.
First, a review of The Republic, the 1984 film that showed audiences the Galactic civilization before its collapse.
Then The Clone Wars, a startling 1985 war epic that transformed Anakin Skywalker into a national hero while destroying nearly everything he believed in.
Next comes The Dark Times, the tragic 1986 conclusion that reimagined the birth of Darth Vader.
Finally, we will return to a retrospective written at the end of 1986, when audiences in that other universe could look back upon a completed six-film saga.
Perhaps what they saw in those films tells us something about our own history.
And perhaps the stories that were never told can be as interesting as the ones that were.
Next: The Republic (1984) — How a civilization destroyed itself while celebrating its greatest victory.
Editor's note: The Quantum Mirror Archives is an imaginative alternate-history fiction project. The recovered films, documents and reviews presented in this series are fictional, inspired by the history and mythology of Star Wars. They are not claims of actual lost films or screenplays.
